Mark Chou wrote:
> David and Bruce,
>> Well, I don't recall the exact time frame, but in my case even though I
> had two tuners (one on each machine), the "jarring changes" I'm
> referring to were the deferment of (weekslot) recordings even though a
> tuner was available. (In other words myth no longer tried to use all
> tuners at the earliest opportunity, but had instead changed "strategy"
> of using only one tuner as much as possible, in the case of weekslot
> records).
I see. There were no such logic changes at that time. Until
last week the scheduler would initially place everyting on the
first input then find everything that had overlapping times.
As a result, If there was a series and it had descriptions
that could be matched as duplicates and there were multiple
showigs of an episode in the listings and there was a conlict
during the first showing and there was a later showing without
a conflict then the later non-conflicting showing was chosen
to record.
It always worked this way but in earlier versions 1) the conflits
pages did not show all of the other duplicate showing and didn't
give you any status information for the things in gray and 2)
even if you noticed an earlier showing, there was nothing you
could do about it if it was gray and not marked in yellow.
The "jarring changes" you saw were that 1) you were now shown all
"O"therShowings and status information so that you could see what
had been happening all along and 2) overrides allowed you to fix
anything you'd like to change by marking things in gray to "Record
it anyway" or anything in white as "Don't record it".
What you saw as a new mystery that you now had to do something
about was actually an old mystery that was finally exposed and
you were given a new opportunity to make the changes that you
deems appropriate.
> This had the unfortunate side-effect of pinning virtually all
> recordings to the master backend, and rendering the slave backend
> unused. The bottom line was there were consequences in terms of storage
> allocated to each machine, and the change took me by surprise,
> unannounced and unplanned. I suppose these changes could conceivably
> have happened prior to myth .12, but it wasn't until myth .13 until the
> "user impact" became obvious.
Bingo! See the comments above.
> In your prior descriptions of the (new) scheduler, my *perception* was
> that the user was now responsible for setting priorities on recordings,
> so that myth would "do the right thing." Perhaps this is a
> misconception, but nothing you've stated so far has led me to believe
> otherwise.
*Sigh* I believe you're confusing "you've stated" with "I've
bothered to read". Will stating it (for the fourth time) in-
line help?
------8<---------8<-------
Earliest showing - if a show has multiple showings, the first showing
should always be recorded unless it loses in conflict resolution.
[...]
Earliest showing
Verified.
With "Reschedule Higher Priorities" turned off, a higher priority show
that could be postponed to a later showing will record even if a lower
priority title will not be recorded as a result. In this example,
Nova at 8pm is marked to record and SportsCenter marked as a conflict:
Title - Subtitle Chan ChID Day Start End S C I O N Pri
American Idol 5 1005 24 20:00-21:00 1 2 2 0 2 1
Nova - "Spies That Fly" 10 1010 24 20:00-21:00 1 1 1 0 1 2
SportsCenter 30 1030 24 20:00-21:00 1 0 0 0 C 0
Nova - "Spies That Fly" 10 1010 25 01:00-02:00 1 0 0 0 E 2
------8<---------8<-------
The other, and I believe more desirable behavior is to go to
TV Settings->Recording Priorities->General and check the box
for "Reschedule Higher Priorities". It will still always choose
the first showing if nothing is forced out by conflict. However,
if somethnig doesn't fit at first, it will look to see if something
can be moved to a "L"aterShowing to resolve it. Here is the same
example with this option turned on:
Title - Subtitle Chan ChID Day Start End S C I O N Pri
American Idol 5 1005 24 20:00-21:00 1 2 2 0 2 1
Nova - "Spies That Fly" 10 1010 24 20:00-21:00 1 0 0 0 L 2
SportsCenter 30 1030 24 20:00-21:00 1 1 1 0 1 0
Nova - "Spies That Fly" 10 1010 25 01:00-02:00 1 1 1 0 1 2
> To me, even myth .14 got a bit onerous because I now have to
> manually override deferred records via the "fix schedules" screen,
s/now have to/finally able to/ # ;-)
> virtually all the time.
In testing, the conditions that would result in a later showing
occur for less than 2% of the items in even a very heavy schedule.
> And now as a user of the new scheduler, I've
> got the added burden of dealing with program priorities?
But you could leave all the priorities at zero and it would make
the same decisions the same way it had in .10 and earlier.
However, if you let the scheduler know that there was one show
that you cared about more than the rest, it could faithfully
respond to your preference. There is no mandatory burden, only
opportunities to let it do a better job for you.
> In some ways I
> can't but feel nostalgic for the scheduler of myth .10 :). Please
> correct me if this is a misconception.
Since the difference is that it was doing things in undesirable
ways and not letting us know about it and not taking our
preferences into account, I'd conclude that this nostalgia
amounts to "ignorance is bliss" ;-) because we were given a
schedule and had to accept it.
-- bjm